Pages

Recent Posts

Friday, August 31, 2012

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.- Congressman Paul Ryan at the Republican National Convention, August 29, 2012

YouTube description: Youth unemployment remains high, with 18-24 year olds facing unemployment over 15%. In a poll conducted by Crossroads Generation of 800 registered voters aged 18-29, only 22% said that they thought Obama had put into place policies that have made it easier for young people to find jobs. We can do better.

Did you see these? Honestly, I'm beginning to think Romney is a decent man even though I still think he is a Progressive. But, seriously, when the choice is between Romney and Obama, there really is only one choice and it is not Obama. - Reggie

Obama has cancelled campaign events in order to go to Louisiana Monday because today's visit by Romney has forced Obama's hand. Remember Hurricane Katrina? The press practically destroyed George W. Bush for not landing in Louisiana after that storm and they have not said a word about Obama campaigning throughout the hurricane. Media bias, anyone? - Reggie

UPDATE 1:10 p.m. EST: The White House has announced that Obama plans to visit hurricane-ravaged Louisiana Monday to observe recovery efforts.

Mitt Romney scrambled his schedule Friday to visit Louisiana and examine first-hand the damage caused by Hurricane Isaac and to meet with Gov. Bobby Jindal whose request for full financial assistance was snubbed by President Barack Obama.

Obama has not traveled to either Louisiana or Mississippi to view the storm’s damage.

The Category 1 hurricane killed four people in Louisiana and Mississippi and stranded 500 residents who were rescued by first responders in boats. Nearly one million homes and businesses have lost power, almost half the state of Louisiana, the Associated Press reported.

Jindal and Republican Sen. David Vitter asked Obama to fully reimburse the state for its cost to handle and clean up after the storm, but federal assistance will only supplement state and local efforts to prepare and respond.

The president was kept informed of the hurricane during a campaign swing this week across college campuses, while First Lady Michelle Obama made television appearances on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” “Dr. Oz,” and “Rachael Ray.”

Wednesday marked the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which nearly devastated the City of New Orleans in 2005.

A guide to what’s off limits.Thumper the Rabbit’s parents always taught him, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” If the Left’s self-appointed Omniscient Diviners of True Meaning have their way, conservatives in the public square won’t be left with anything at all to say. Ever.It’s a treacherous business exercising your freedom of speech in the age of Obama. As a public service, I present to you: “The 2012 Condensed Liberal Handbook of Racial Code Words.” Decoder rings, activate!— Angry. On the campaign trail this summer, President Obama has become — in the words of the mainstream Associated Press — more “aggressive.” But don’t you dare call him “angry.” According to MSNBC host Touré, that’s racist!“You notice he said ‘anger’ twice,” Touré fumed in response to a speech last week by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man.” Or maybe Romney is just accurately describing the singular temperament of the growling, finger-jabbing, failure-plagued demagogue-in-chief. It’s about the past four years, not 400 years. Sheesh.— Chicago. The Obamas and their core team of astroturfers, pay-for-play schemers, and powerbrokers hail from the Windy City. This is a simple geographic fact. But in progressive-of-pallor Chris Matthews’ world, it’s an insidious dog whistle. The frothing cable TV host attacked Republicans this week who had the gall to remind voters of the ruthless Chicago way.“(They keep saying ‘Chicago,’ by the way. Have you noticed?” Matthews sputtered. “That sends that message: This guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods and screwing us in the ‘burbs.”Actually, it’s a pointed reminder that the radical redistribution politics of Chicago-on-the-Potomac have done little to alleviate the suffering of impoverished Americans in violence-plagued, job-hungry inner cities everywhere. Racist!— Constitution. Fox News contributor Juan Williams, who proudly calls himself a “real reporter,” has apparently added real telepathist to his curriculum vitae. Earlier this year, he read the minds of Republicans and conservatives whom he accuses of deep-seated bigotry when they show any public reverence for our founding principles, documents, and leaders.“The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message,” Williams wrote. “References to a lack of respect for the ‘Founding Fathers’ and the ‘Constitution’ also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core ‘old-fashioned American values.’”So, if you ever find yourself wanting to hum the Schoolhouse Rock version of the Preamble, heed these three words: Stop the hate!Read the rest of the column

I’ll leave it to the crack reporting of others at PJ Media on the ground in Tampa to give you the full story of the Republican
National Convention. But I detected a change from past GOP conventions
that bears mention. The Republicans seem to at last be reading Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. The messages and tactics of Alinsky, long the monopoly of the Left, have been discovered by the Right.A couple of examples. First, Clint Eastwood’s speech was pure Alinsky.

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

The mockery of the empty chair was straight out of Rule 5, and predictably, the Left is seething and irrational over it.But the message of the night was Alinsky’s Rule 4.

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

This has become the centerpiece of the Romney campaign — forcing Obama to live up to his own standards, his own book of broken promises from 2008. The keystone of Romney’s speech was that he won’t lower the oceans or heal the Earth, but instead will help hurting American families.

RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”

Romney presented the constructive alternative. After Eastwood obliterated Obama and reminded everyone of the lost hope of 2008, Romney’s positive vision gave Americans something that has been lacking for three years — a constructive, positive alternative vision for America. The vision reminds people of an age before Obama, when the entire nation watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon. Pride and confidence are the alternative to diminishment and fear.And if there was any doubt, this campaign will be about the failures of President Obama, failures of the man to fulfill the requirements of the office.

As Obama looks increasingly vulnerable, the media is pulling out the stops.Silly season is over. Racist season is here.Silly season is when nothing is going on in the presidential campaign and the debate focuses on trivialities. Racist season is when the campaign begins in earnest and President Barack Obama looks vulnerable. Then, liberal commentators pull out all the stops to deem practically any criticism of the president racist.Chris Matthews of MSNBC led the charge with an on-set rant against Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. Criticizing the gutting of welfare reform? Racist. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s joke about no one ever asking for his birth certificate? Racist, too. Saying the president is inspired by a European welfare-state model? Obviously racist.Priebus looked like he’d been buttonholed by a persistent drunk at a bar and didn’t know how to get away.It’s only late August, and the campaign is tied. Wait until October, especially if Obama is trailing. In the imaginations of the president’s devotees, an America where he is behind by 2 or 3 points will be indistinguishable from an America where blacks are set on by dogs during civil-rights marches.When Romney joked in Michigan that no one ever had to ask for his birth certificate, it was a banner day in the racist season. Michael Eric Dyson, who apparently earned an advanced degree in finding obscure ways to accuse people of bigotry, detected the telltale signs of “othering.”“Other” used to be a perfectly fine word, then became jargon fit for use only by people with regular MSNBC gigs or endowed chairs in nonsense.It’s not clear why the former Massachusetts governor would insist that Obama is an American during the Republican primaries only to lurch toward birtherism in the general election, with an unscripted joke he will never, ever repeat.Read the full column

Nor will conservatism, if Obama wins and is left free to pursue his inner Che.The world is dynamic rather than static, so constantly thinking ahead is the key to understanding. Recognize now that on the morning after the election, whatever the result, America will never be the same. The results themselves will have wrought basic, fundamental change for the body politic. That inevitability underlines and highlights what you should be doing now to influence those results.Karl Marx's Last StandThe wildly overconfident Left is least attuned to what is at stake for them. If Barack Obama is routed this fall as he should be, it will be worse for the left-wing neo-Marxist views he represents than if he had never been elected at all. For then the voters will have seen what he is offering and rejected it. In retrospect, Reagan's landslide defeat of Carter followed by his landslide reelection ushered in a generation of Reaganite dominance of national politics. Clinton figured out a way for Democrats to accommodate that dominance, enabling them to hold public office as long as they did not interfere with the ongoing Reagan revolution. But the public did not fully accept and embrace Clinton until he accepted that bargain. See 1994.The last four years have been a coming out party for the Democrats. For over a hundred years now, Progressivism, a polite, Americanized term for Marxism, has been infiltrating and taking over the Democrat party, the national media, academia, the courts. But until now they have effectively hidden what they are all about. Under Obama, however, the heart and soul of the party has been let out of the closet and revealed (only for those paying attention, however, not the millions who so stubbornly still are not). And that heart and soul is Che.Having attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School, I saw all of this first hand. I saw all those prep school Marxists pledging to each other life long fealty to the worldwide socialist revolution, and going on to pose as "liberal" reporters and commentators, "liberal" environmentalists plotting the destruction of capitalism and its middle class prosperity from within, "liberal" candidates moderated just enough to get elected in their districts or states, "liberal" academics tutoring the next generation in the proper, socially acceptable attitudes to worker revolution, and providing cover for each other on the acceptability of more and more radical views.Hillary Rodham Clinton from Wellesley is a classic case of the Progressive committed from an early age to fomenting revolution from within. I saw the Barack Obama types as well, more openly radicalized because they realized as minorities polite society would have to accept their grievances and philosophy as legitimate. But I never thought a majority of Americans would be so foolish as to not see where they are coming from.Let us scrap the social diplomacy so we can communicate most effectively. Barack Obama is not just a communist infiltrator. He is communist royalty, born and bred. He hails from a self-professed communist Kenyan as his father, and from an anti-American 1960s hippie as his mother. Left to be raised by his "progressive" grandparents, he was provided a personal mentor during his adolescent years who was an open member of the Communist Party USA, Franklin Marshall Davis.In his own autobiographies he tells us how he favored Marxist professors and student radicals in the Ivy League colleges where they are fostered. After he graduates, he becomes not just a student but an instructor in the social manipulation methodologies of openly Marxist revolutionary Saul Alinsky. In the opening pages of his worshipped masterpiece Rules for Radicals, Alinsky dedicates the book to the first true radical -- Satan. One of Alinsky's rules is to pose as an advocate for the middle class as the most effective way to overturn what he and his cohorts see as the most worldwide blood sucking class in world history. ("White folks greed runs a world in need," they say.) Obama provides these classes in the employ of the nasty Marxist street agitator organization ACORN.And it goes on and on. Obama launches his political career in the living room of confessed, anti-American terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. He attends the church of neo-Marxist Black Liberation Theologist Jeremiah Wright. I am not trying to break news here, just connect all the dots.Following Alinsky, Obama campaigns today as an advocate for the middle class. But he and his compatriots see the American middle class as a moral embarrassment because we are so much richer and more prosperous than the rest of the world. That is what he was thinking when he was foolish enough to say "we just can't keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert, and keep consuming 25% of the world's resources with just 4% of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead we'll be fine."Actually what we expect an American President to say to the rest of the world is that they have nothing to say about how we live, which stems overwhelmingly from voluntary transactions among a free people. And if you are unhappy with your standard of living, you can try that too, we are not stopping you, we are encouraging you, and probably defending you, at our expense. But Barack Obama will not say that because, wherever he was born, he is not culturally an American.This is why Obama and his cohorts are not the least perturbed by the onrushing return to recession in 2013, first fully explained in my own Encounter Books Broadside No. 25, "Obama and the Crash of 2013," so obvious now that even the Washington establishment CBO is ringing the alarm bells. A second, double dip, recession before we have ever even recovered from the last one would just further plunder the resources and standard of living of the American people, especially the middle class. Moreover, Obama and his neo-Marxist strategists see New Deal style political benefits from that, as more and more Americans become dependent on government, and so vote to keep their paymasters in power.Moreover, in a second Obama term, the plunder of the American middle class will accelerate well beyond this, easing the pain of the moral embarrassment over America's riches suffered by Obama and his cohorts. It is all explained further in Stanley Kurtz's new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. He should have said how Obama will rob the suburbs to pay for the cities, because this will really blossom into full swing in a second term agenda.Indeed, in a second term, the rule of law will collapse as well, as the checks and balances among the branches of government break down. By the second term, Obama will have appointed a majority of federal judges. This is particularly ominous as the liberal judges he appoints believe not in applying the law as it is, but making up the law as they think it should be. And, of course, they will think the law should be whatever it needs to be to enable Obama to do whatever he wants to do.Expect as well in a second term for the Supreme Court to break down as well as a check and balance, as it already has in the case of Obamacare. Barely five aging men on the court cannot hold the line against the Obama onslaught for four more years. Obama just needs one more appointment to seize the court for his make it up as you go along judicial activist liberals. Gone then will be any judicial check on his illegal activities, such as making recess appointments without the consent of the Senate, when Congress is not in recess. Or creating bureaucracies operating outside the rule of law, such as Dodd-Franks' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has the power to tax and regulate with no supervision from any branch of government, or the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which has the power to cut Medicare without Congressional approval.In a second term, Obama will be free as well to fix the second great moral embarrassment that so troubles him -- America's global military dominance. Already underway is his great military builddown, slashing America's Navy to it's lowest number of ships since 1916, or adding the fewest number of planes to America's Air Force since 1947. Most dangerous will be Obama's unilateral nuclear disarmament, which is also already underway as a result. When America's military is cut down to size, then America can sit at the table of nations as one equal among all the others, and Obama can sleep at night with the satisfaction of a job well done. Just as Reagan gave us Peace through Strength, I expect a second Obama term to give us War through Weakness, as Obama's military builddown successfully induces some foreign enemies to attack us, with battle loss size domestic casualties as a result. Don't expect any gauche effective American military response either, as that would go back to the big, bad white bullies beating up the little people, which would be another moral embarrassment keeping Obama up at night.Read the rest of the article

China government funding anti-U.S., anti-NATO radio broadcasts in AfghanistanA popular radio station in Afghanistan is funded by China’s international propaganda outlet and is broadcasting news with an anti-U.S. and anti-NATO bent, according to U.S. officials.The Pashto-language Spogmai radio was set up recently as an FM station in Afghanistan, and U.S. officials say it admits to receiving funds from China Radio International (CRI), Beijing’s state-run propaganda outlet formerly known as Radio Beijing.U.S. officials said an analysis of Spogmai revealed it has received training and equipment in addition to the funding and that much of its news reports include anti-American and anti-NATO material, along with occasional anti-Pakistan broadcasts.Spogmai broadcasters took part in an international forum in Beijing on Dec. 2 and told attendees that CRI was providing funding, training, and equipment.U.S. monitoring of Spogmai broadcasts since May reveals that its broadcasts are systematically critical of the U.S. military and NATO, which have been spending billions of dollars to rebuild Afghanistan and battle the Islamist Taliban insurgency.One July 31 broadcast stated that Afghans are the only casualty of “someone else’s war” and are fighting their own people on behalf of U.S. and western “politicians.”Read the full story

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly shouted "Time has run out!" at U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, as the two met in Israel earlier this week and discussed the Obama administration's position on Iran.The Jerusalem Post reported that Shapiro was in Israel for meetings with Netanyahu, and at some point the PM couldn't hold his frustration with President Obama in any longer: "Instead of pressuring Iran in an effective way, Obama and his people are pressuring us not to attack the nuclear facilities." Those present say Netanyahu then said assertively: "Time has run out!"Read the full post

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Wow. I would say this is one of the most powerful ads I've seen this election cycle. - Reggie

YouTube description: On August 28, 2012 the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) announced the launch of a $150,000 television ad campaign across Missouri highlighting President Obama's extreme record on abortion and featuring abortion survivor Melissa Ohden. Missouri has recently been at the center of the conversation on abortion.

"In light of the recent national discussion over abortion, it's important Americans know the President's best-kept secret: his extreme record on abortion. Melissa Ohden's powerful story draws a stark contrast to his unbending support of abortion and the abortion industry and reveals the human face to this debate." said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. "President Obama's appalling record on abortion is not just limited to his four votes to deny rights to abortion survivors but spans to his recent heartless refusal to support bans on sex-selection and late-term abortions. These actions fly in the face of mainstream American views and run counter to the President's first term pre-election talk of finding common ground. Recent polling reveals the majority of Americans support bans on these horrific practices."

Two venerable American gun manufacturers — Remington and Colt — could head for the West their weapons helped win if New York and Connecticut force them to implement microstamping technology.

Microstamping, or ballistic imprinting, is a patented process that uses laser technology to engrave a tiny marking of the make, model and serial number on the tip of a gun’s firing pin to allow an imprint of that information on spent cartridge cases. Supporters of the technology say it will be a “game changer,” allowing authorities to quickly identify the registered guns used in crimes. Opponents claim the process is costly, unreliable and may ultimately impact the local economies that heavily depend on the gun industry, including Ilion, N.Y., where Remington Arms maintains a factory, and Hartford, Conn., where Colt's manufacturing is headquartered.

“Mandatory microstamping would have an immediate impact of a loss of 50 jobs,” New York State Sen. James Seward, a Republican whose district includes Ilion, said, adding that Remington employs 1,100 workers in the town. “You’re talking about a company that has options in other states. Why should they be in a state that’s hostile to legal gun manufacturing? There could be serious negative economic impact with the passage of microstamping and other gun-control laws.”

In March, prior to the recent mass shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and at New York’s iconic Empire State Building, Remington executive Stephen Jackson wrote to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warning forced microstamping could prompt the company to “reconsider its commitment to the New York market altogether rather than spend the astronomical sums of money” necessary to reconfigure its manufacturing and assembly processes.

Ilion Mayor John Stephens told FoxNews.com he believes the company, which has had suitors in several Midwest states with less restrictive gun laws, was not bluffing. Stephens also said the microstamping proposal is bad legislation.

I am posting this so you can be informed about this Progressive Republican power grab at the RNC today. It appears they have voted for these new rules today in order to shut out the Tea Party and conservatives in future elections and conventions. Here is Michelle Malkin's most recent headline on this story:

It may be time for a third party since the Republicans don't want conservatives and Tea Party members in their "big tent." I've linked to Rush's comments below. - Reggie

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined a chorus of grassroots conservatives in calling for two proposed rule changes, backed by the top brass of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to be rejected on the floor of the Republican National Convention. Palin said the two proposed rule changes that would impact delegates and would allow the RNC to change the party rules in between conventions in the future were “very disappointing” and “must be rejected.”

“It's a direct attack on grassroots activists by the GOP establishment, and it must be rejected,” Palin wrote in a Facebook note after spending a day in Arizona campaigning before thousands for Arizona House candidate Kirk Adams (R). “Without the energy and wisdom of the grassroots, the GOP would not have had the
historic 2010 electoral victories. That's why the controversial rule change being debated at the RNC convention right now is so very disappointing.

“We have to remember that this election is not just about replacing the party in power. It's about who and what we replace it with.”

On Friday, Republican officials associated with the Romney campaign strong-armed two rule changes into the draft platform. The first rule would have effectively allowed future presidential candidates -- and not states -- to choose the delegates that represent them. In what appears to be a compromise, the text of the rule has been changed to allow states to still select delegates.

Of more concern, though, is Rule 12, and the compromise on selecting delegates will be moot if Rule 12 remains in place.

Rule 12 would allow the RNC to change the rules between conventions if 75% of committee members agree to do so. Since committee members usually agree to what the RNC chair wants, this effectively is a rubber stamp that allows the RNC to amend the rules whenever it wants.

“As long as the proposed Rule 12 remains in place, this ‘deal’ or ‘compromise’ must be a no-go,” Malkin wrote. “Don’t back down, activists!”

Conservative talk radio host and author Mark Levin said the power grab was akin to something President Barack Obama would do.

“Conservatives of all stripes, especially Tea Party activists, this is an attempt to destroy your ability to influence the presidential and vice presidential nomination process in the Republican Party,” Levin wrote. “It is an attempt to eviscerate the input of state parties. It is a brazen assault on the grassroots. And it is sleazy to the core.”

Monday, August 27, 2012

The controversial super PAC Special Operations for America, led by former Navy SEALs, is set to release a blistering new ad against President Obama Tuesday at the Republican National Convention.

The ad, titled “Bow to Nobody,” depicts Navy SEALs in combat situations; it then proclaims that they fight so that America will not have to bow to anybody.

Then the punch line: the infamous photo of Obama bowing to the Saudi king.

The ad is sure to provoke massive consternation on the left, which has been in a frenzy ever since Special Operations for America launched. The event at which the ad launches, “Defending Our Defenders: A Salute to the United States Military,” will feature a tribute by Congressman Louie Gohmert, former members of SEAL Team Six, Army Rangers, Gold Star parents, and a few surprise guests.

Ryan Zinke, the former Navy SEAL who started the super PAC, spoke exclusively with Breitbart News today. “The ad itself accurately portrays where this President is,” said Zinke. “It accurately portrays his core belief that America should not lead. This president is shaping America to be one of the followers, to relinquish our role as a world leader. I didn’t fight 23 years as a Navy SEAL to watch America bow to anybody.”

Only about 3 to 5 percent of voters are truly undecided between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Focus groups run by Republicans have found that some of the most effective ads appealing to those voters feature Democrats and independents speaking candidly about how they voted for Obama in 2008 but are now disappointed.

That’s one of the reasons that Republicans have decided to showcase former Democratic congressman Artur Davis of Alabama as a “headline” speaker at their convention. Davis, a moderate black Democrat who voted against Obamacare in 2010 and was crushed later that year in a Democratic primary for governor, has since left the Democratic party and is backing Mitt Romney. He was an early Obama supporter — the first Democratic congressman outside Illinois to endorse the candidate in 2007. He seconded Obama’s nomination for president at the 2008 Denver convention.

“The Obama I endorsed was the constitutional-law professor who said he supported the rule of law,” Davis explained to me. “Instead, we got someone who always went to the left whenever he reached a fork in the road.” Now Davis spends a great deal of time describing his conversion to Republican audiences. Even Jamelle Bouie, a writer for the left-wing American Prospect who doesn’t find Davis’s conversion story all that compelling, acknowledges its power. “Davis, like Joe Lieberman before him (and Zell Miller before that), can tell a credible story of ideological alienation,” Bouie wrote in the Washington Post. “He thought the Democratic Party was a big tent, but now — under Barack Obama — it is a haven for intolerant leftism.”

Davis himself puts it very simply. He wanted to get beyond race and run as a moderate who would unite people of all kinds behind a reform agenda. “Democrats know that only a moderate can win for their party now in Alabama — the legislature even went GOP in 2010 — but I was a threat to their interest groups. The teachers’ union knew I backed charter schools and they preferred to have a Republican elected rather than a Democrat who might move that party to the center.”

He says he is surprised at the reaction he’s gotten from conservative audiences. “You have a converted sinner who’s standing in front of you right now, and I thank you for letting me stand here,” he told a tea-party group in Falls Church, Va., this summer. “I used to go to the Baptist church in Birmingham, and Baptists are good folks. But they won’t let nobody preach on week one, or month one, like y’all will.”

A major reason Republicans have embraced Davis with such enthusiasm is the manner in which he abandoned liberalism. He wrote an op-ed piece for his hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, in October 2011, endorsing a voter-ID law being debated in the Alabama legislature.

Requiring a photo ID in order to vote may be supported by a large majority of Americans — 74 percent in the latest Washington Post poll (including 65 percent of African Americans) — but it has been portrayed by liberal elites as a discriminatory tool designed to suppress black turnout.

One of those voices was Bill Clinton, who in July 2011 excoriated the nationwide movement to pass voter-ID laws as the return of Jim Crow. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax, and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Davis took his party’s former president on. He wrote: “I was disappointed to see Bill Clinton, a very good president and an even greater ex-president, compare voter ID to Jim Crow, and it is chilling to see the intimidation tactics brought to bear on African-American, Democratic legislators in Rhode Island who had the nerve to support a voter ID law in that very liberal state.”

The former congressman had real credibility in blowing the whistle on this preposterous rhetoric. The two-thirds black district Davis had represented from 2003 to 2011 included Selma, home of the National Voting Rights Museum, and other landmarks of the 1960s struggle for racial equality and voting rights. He had been an active member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and his career had begun with an internship at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an iconic civil-rights group.

So it was startling to read Davis’s mea culpa:

I’ve changed my mind on voter ID laws — I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one — and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office. When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.

Davis recognized that the “most aggressive” voter suppression in the African-American community “is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.” A predominantly black region in Alabama known for its dark, rich soil, the Black Belt comprises some of the poorest counties in the state — and some of the most prone to voter fraud.

“Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights — that’s suppression by any light,” continued Davis in his op-ed. “If you doubt it exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I’ve been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed a few close local election results.”

YouTube description: In the Weekly Republican Address, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) says many of the nation's problems could have been solved if President Obama had worked with congressional Republicans. "Together we could fix entitlements," he says. "Even in an election year, I've offered to work with the President. I've called and written." But, Sen. Paul says, "the President is missing in action. While America flounders, the President campaigns. We deserve better. A country with such a rich heritage deserves a leader who values the work ethic and understands that you did build that. That you did earn that."

Last February Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said "Israel is a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off." Khamenei promised to support any groups fighting Israel anywhere in the world. On about August 17, Iranian President Ahmadinejad said Israel's existence is an insult to humanity. There has been an almost steady stream of Iranian provocations like these. Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear weapons program proceeds unabated.

This week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will attend a summit of the 120 UN "non-aligned" nations in Tehran giving the Iranian kakistocracy the legitimacy it craves, further isolating Israel and diminishing America's position in the Middle East.

What comes next will be a war between Israel and Iran. Unfortunately, there's a lot of fuzzy thinking going around about how that war could be prevented. In short, it cannot.

Too little and too much has been made of the conflicting statements by White House press secretary Jay Carney and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's statements on diplomatic efforts to stop Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

Carney, in a press briefing two weeks ago, said the Obama administration believed there was still "time and space" for sanctions to work. Shortly after that, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said Israel's clock "is ticking faster" than America's. Oren repeated the statement made by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu late last month that sanctions have failed to stop Iran's nuclear program. Not that they are failing or are likely to fail. Netanyahu used the present perfect tense, not the future, and he is correct. That means Israel's moment to take military action has almost arrived.

Oren also said that while Israel appreciates the supporting rhetoric coming from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, there are "structural differences between the United States and Israel which we can't ignore."

Too much has been made of this because most of the analysis is entirely wrong. Analysts have said this indicates that Netanyahu has decided to attack Iran before the U.S. election, which is almost certainly untrue. Too little has been made of it because it indicates how dire the Israelis believe the situation has become, and how little influence America will have at the onset or the end of what is likely to become the largest war the Middle East has ever seen.

Perhaps the most wrong-headed analysis came from the least likely source. Charles Krauthammer's August 24 column said that Israel was either engaged in the "most elaborate deception since the Trojan horse or it is on the cusp of a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities." Krauthammer proceeds from that assertion to adopt CSIS analyst Tony Cordesman's three points to forestall the conflict.

Cordesman, as Krauthammer relates, says there should be a statement of "clear U.S. red lines" that Iran cannot cross, that we must make it clear to Iran that it has no successful options for developing nuclear weapons and that we need to give the Iranians a "face-saving way out."

But Israel isn't required to choose between deception and imminent war. In fact, any successful strategy would have to combine the two and give flexibility to the term "imminent." Because America's influence on both Iran and Israel has been significantly diminished by Obama's hostility toward Israel -- and his comprehensive weakness in dealing with Iran -- we lack the credibility of posting "clear red lines" or imposing a non-nuclear option on Iran.

Lastly, and most obtusely, the idea Cordesman poses for a "face-saving way out" for Iran assumes something entirely disconnected from the realities of Tehran's decades-long nuclear program: that there is any path away from nuclear weapons that Iran could conclude is more attractive to it than the path it is on.

We believe that Iran is accelerating its uranium enrichment program and may already have enough to construct three or four nuclear warheads. We know that Iran has been developing nuclear weapons triggers as well as the technology for delivering warheads by missile. But what we don't know far outweighs what we do, which is only one of the reasons we can't declare "clear red lines" or impose any non-nuclear option on Iran. We haven't had accurate, reliable intelligence on Iran's nuclear program for at least a decade. No matter what "red lines" we may theoretically declare, there's no way for us to know when they've been crossed short of Iran conducting an underground nuclear test.

In order for us to impose any non-nuclear option on Iran we'd have to have a level of influence in Iran -- and in Israel and across the Middle East -- that we now lack. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama repeatedly declared that Iran will not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, but neither took any action to prevent it from doing so.

When Obama announced the imposition of major sanctions against Iran, he also -- almost simultaneously -- exempted most European and Far Eastern nations from them. No wonder that Israel's ambassador said there were "structural differences" between our approach to Iran and Israel's: Israel is serious, and we're not. We used to be Israel's strongest ally, but it now has little reason to believe it can rely on us.

Israel doesn't want to be accused of interfering in our election, so any attack on Iran will wait until after the November election. The hostility Obama has shown to Israel already could be nearly matched by alienation of Israel's American allies if Israel is seen to interfere with the election. That's a risk that Israel won't take unless there is a threat so great and so imminent that it demands action. Israel will wait until the election is over.

The rule of law and liberal democracy…are crumbling under the leadership of [the] president... [He] has subverted the fundamental institutions of government, converting them into tools for maintaining and consolidating personal power. His government
and its supporters harass those who do not align themselves politically and ideologically with [him]. They use various means to persecute their political opponents, including (among other things) assaults in the media, violence, censorship and false criminal charges. (From a
white paper by Robert Amsterdam, Gonzalo Santomé, and Antonio Rosich.)

When I learned that Joe Biden would be crashing the Republicans' party at the now weather-shortened GOP convention in Tampa this week, my first reaction was "How typical for such a classless, in-the-gutter, desperate campaign." The fact that nature has thwarted the Democrats' politically vulgar behavior, with Biden announcing on Sunday that he has canceled his trip into "the belly of the beast," does not lessen their puerile intent.

The behavior of Obama's henchmen, and even more so his henchwomen, is to politics what the nouveau riche are to high society: they have come into power without having any understanding of how to behave once they have it.

To be sure, politics ain't beanbag. The Marquess of Queensberry never prescribed rules for campaigning. But even if he had, it's unlikely that the Obama administration and Democrat leaders in Congress would heed them given their disdain for our prescribed rules for governing, also known as the Constitution.

After all, this is the political party that told us we have to pass a bill regulating more of American life than any other piece of legislation in our history in order to find out what's in it. The party that, when asked whether that legislation was constitutional, responded that it was not a serious question.

This is the party whose supporter, Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa Jr., offered Michigan union workers to Obama as "your army" in his "war" against his political opponents, saying "Let's take these son of a bitches out." (At least he's a Democrat thug rather than an English teacher.)

This is the party whose henchwoman suggested that Mitt Romney had committed a felony by taking a leave of absence from Bain while still being reported to the SEC as its CEO. Then President Obama in his first press conference in months -- so much for being the most transparent administration ever -- said "nobody accused Romney of being a felon," yet was not challenged on that falsehood by a single reporter in the room.

And now, this is the party that wanted to send its white-hair-transplanted Howdy Doody vice president to try to draw media attention from what will likely be the most important event, including the most important speech, of Mitt Romney's political career.

Following Biden's spineless cancelation -- after all, shouldn't someone going to attack a beast be willing to brave a stiff breeze? -- Republicans may be reminded of the 16th century English proverb that it's an ill wind that blows nobody (any) good.

Breaching precedent and decorum, Obama will also campaign this week, mostly going to college campuses, where even the perpetually idealist and naïve youth of America are showing up in smaller numbers than four years ago as they consider the dim job prospects offered by the Obama economy and the unpleasant vision of having to move back in with their parents.

And Michelle Obama, perhaps wearing high-dollar couture purchased on one of her several expensive (at least for taxpayers) vacations, will be a guest on the David Letterman show where she may nag the nation's parents about our children's diets. (Is she known to have thoughts on any other subject?)

Low class, nouveau puissant, to be sure. But it's more than that. This is not just about our clownish veep, narcissistic president, or supercilious first shopper cum dietician. It is about the character of our government, and by extension our country. The behavior of today's Democrats is undemocratic, better fitting a petty dictatorship than history's greatest and once-freest nation.

Few things speak as profoundly to the corrosive effect of the Obama administration on our republic, to the extent to which Barack Hussein Obama is realizing his dream of "fundamentally transforming" the nation, than the realization that the paragraph leading this article, written about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez's "Rule of Lawlessness," could fairly describe the current situation in the United States.

To be sure Barack Obama, icy-cool character that he is, does not come across -- at least not on a daily basis -- as thuggish as Chávez does. But the radical mindset is the same: An anti-colonialist motivation for "social justice" (despite being generations away from colonialism). An anti-capitalist instinct against entrepreneurship and success (despite decades of evidence of the failure of socialism). And a willingness to do or say anything to further anti-democratic goals while lounging in the aid and comfort offered by a compliant media which, despite rare pangs of conscience, exists literally or figuratively as a propaganda arm of the regime, sitting silently as the national fabric is shredded.

Hugo Chávez often wears a military uniform as he sends supporters to disrupt his challenger's campaign events. Barack Obama wears a suit as he sends employees and supporters to disrupt, or at least distract from, the Republican event that is likely to do more than any other to introduce Mitt Romney to the nation. (In other similarities, Obama and Chávez both oppose, through their bureaucracies, removing dead people from the voter rolls and they both consistently side with the enemies of Israel, though Obama claims to support America's ally while Chávez is at least honest about his hatred of Jews and their homeland.)

Today, the 40th Republican National Convention assembles in hurricane-threatened Tampa, Fla. Seven days later, the 46th Democratic National Convention will assemble in presumably non-hurricane-threatened Charlotte, N.C. Thousands of delegates, many thousands more press personnel and even more political enthusiasts will be on hand.

Vendors will sell political buttons to collectors (does anyone wear them anymore?), and party volunteers will hand out bumper stickers (though I haven't seen many on cars anywhere this year). Party fat-cats will attend elegantly catered receptions, and those lower on the political ladder will buy hot dogs from vendors or sample local cuisine (Cuban food in Tampa's Ybor City; North Carolina barbecue).

The conventions will adopt rules that don't matter (except possibly on delegate selection), adjudge credentials with utter predictability and adopt platforms that bind no one. And of course delegates will officially nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in Tampa and Barack Obama and Joe Biden in Charlotte.

People (and the federal government) will spend very large sums of money on all this. Many will ask why we still have national conventions at all.

They are a gift, for some an unwanted gift, from history. The national convention was originated by the long-departed Anti-Masonic Party in 1831 and copied by Andrew Jackson's Democrats in 1832. After the Republican Party was formed in 1854, it followed suit with a national convention in 1856.

Until the 1960s, the national convention was a communications medium. Political leaders in the various states seldom met each other, outside of sessions of Congress, during the four years between presidential elections.

Men did business well into the 1960s in written form: They spent their days reading their correspondence, dictating replies, and proofreading and signing their letters. Long-distance telephone calls were unusual; direct distance dialing was introduced only in the 1950s.

People ordinarily didn't put in writing their bottom-line negotiating position. Recipients sometimes ignored the command to "burn this letter." Better to wait until you could meet in person, in the convention city.

As a result, even the shrewdest politicians didn't know who had how many votes until the convention roll call was conducted. Campaign managers would hold back votes on early ballots to show momentum later. "Favorite son" candidates with support from home state delegations would wait for real contenders to bid for their support.